TextFormattingRules

ZWiki formatting conventions make it easy for everyone to create
nice web pages without making it hard for anyone to read and edit
other people's page source. This page is for helping both novice
and experienced users understand the rules, where intuition doesn't
suffice:

A quick reference, for those already familiar
with (or intuiting) the format. It has links into...

Lists

Ordered Bulleted Lists : Paragraphs beginning with a
sequence of digits followed by a white-space character are
treated as ordered list elements.

Definition lists : Paragraphs with first line
containing text followed by some white-space and --

Background and Elaboration

ZWiki's "structuredtext" format text is based on Zope's
StructuredText, plus some WikiWikiWeb conventions. Both are
concerned with the readability and intuitive obviousness of the raw
text - to prevent formatting from getting in the way of editing.
The ultimate aim is to support crafting of text that is readable and
attractive in both the formatted and the raw form.

With ZWiki pages, you indicate everything, including the structure of
a document - its sections and the nesting of subsections, its
formatting, links, and stuff like that - using plain-text formatting
conventions. (ZWiki text can include raw HTML, in case there's some
elaborate HTML formatting you must do beyond what StructuredText
text offers. The less HTML you use, the easier the job will be for
editors - yourself included!)

The source of existing pages can provide good examples of the
conventions - the text of this page, in particular, presents many
central examples. Click the "Edit" or "View" in the page footer to
see.

One formatting feature worth immediate attention is the way
indentation level is used to distinguish sections and subsections:

It starts with paragraphs: adjacent, non-blank text lines in
groups that are bounded above and below by blank lines.

Sections are sequences of these paragraphs with their first
lines having the same indentation, ...

and the subsections are paragraphs whose first lines
have greater indentation than their immediately preceding,
containing sections.

This use of whitespace makes the sectional structure as obvious in
the raw text as it is in the formatted result, without cluttering
the raw text with peculiar, distracting marks. See Sectional
Structure for more details.

Style Formatting

Emphasis: *italic* => italic

Bold: **bold** => bold

Code: 'code' => code

Making and Preventing Links

Expressing Links

Wiki refs : the main way to link to pages in the same wiki,
they're made of two or more run-together capitalized words
naming the target pages. (In ZWiki, numbers can be use where
capital letters would be, except at the beginning of the word,
and ~ tildes can be used as lowercase letters.) When the
target page is there, the wiki ref is rendered as a link to
it. Easy!

Wiki refs also serve to create new pages - when the target page
is absent, then the ref itself is not a link, but it has an
appended question mark, which is a link to a page for creating
authoring and creating the target.

(What happens? The section is bracketed by
&lt;pre>&lt;/pre>" preformatting directives, and any "&lt;"
less-than symbols in the section are turned into &lt;'
before the web server sees them. Thus the server doesn't
specially process anything within the section. This
paragraph is outside the example section, because it's at a
lesser indentation - and so is once again subject to
processing.)

Sectional Structure

See this page's source for examples, and see the bit about
indentation levels, above for more details.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs are adjacent sequences of non-blank text lines.

Sections

Paragraphs have section levels relative to each other, according
to the indentation of their first line. Adjacent sequences of
paragraphs with the same indentation level (the indentation of
the first line is what's significant) make up a single section.
Sections at a deeper level - i.e., having greater indentation -
than their preceding section are subsections of the preceding
section.

Headers

Single-line paragraphs that do not end in punctuation, and
that contain a new subsection - i.e., are immediately followed
by paragraphs with greater indentation - take on the role of
header lines for the subsection. The section header &lt;h#&gt;
... &lt;/h#&gt; header level is determined by how deeply nested
the subsection is within the top level section.

Lists

Unordered Bulleted Lists

Paragraphs beginning with a '-', *, or o are treated as
unordered list elements:

- And example unordered list element (unrendered, so you can
see the formatting)

Ordered Bulleted Lists

Paragraphs beginning with a sequence of digits followed by a
white-space character are treated as ordered list elements.
(The sequence of digits could be a digits or letters with .
periods interspersed - e.g., A.B.C. or 1.1.3.):

1.1. First ordered list element (unrendered)
1.2. Second...

Definition lists

Paragraphs whose first line contains text followed by some
white-space and -- is treated as a descriptive list
element. The leading text is treated as the element title:

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